Creolizing the Modern: Transylvania Across Empires

Since the collapse of the Cold War global order in 1991, the study of Eastern European and Eurasian societies and cultures has emerged by stages from the isolation and particularity fostered by the area-studies geographical boundaries of the past. The siloing of scholars and methods applied to the “second,” or state socialist, world, in distinction from the “first” and “third” worlds, shaped not only the study of the “era of three worlds” itself but also the deeper histories of this world region, which appeared to many as a sui generis zone of alterity or exceptionalism. Reintegration of global and comparative scholarly inquiry in order to comprehend how the three worlds were always also united in a single global scene has proceeded unevenly across multiple disciplinary subfields and modes of study, from feminist and gender studies to migration and diaspora to world literature.In particular, over the past decade this process has entailed the application to Eastern Europe and Eurasia of imperial, postcolonial, and decolonial methods of inquiry developed in the study of empires emanating from Western Europe and their aftermaths, leading to the further articulation and refinement of those methods. Among other important recent contributions to this shared project, one might mention such diverse works as Anita Starosta’s Form and Instability: Eastern Europe, Literature, Postimperial Difference (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2015); Epp Annus’s Soviet Postcolonial Studies: A View from the Western Borderlands (Abingdon: Routledge, 2018); Edyta M. Bojanowska’s World of Empires: The Russian Voyage of the Frigate Pallada (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018); or Rossen Djagalov’s From Internationalism to Postcolonialism: Literature and Cinema between the Second and the Third Worlds (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2020). The book under review is a signal achievement that significantly extends these efforts in both subject matter and theoretical refinement.Creolizing the Modern was co-authored by a literary scholar, Parvulescu, and a sociologist, Boatcǎ, in a highly unusual partnership between specialists in the humanities and social sciences that splices the authors’ disciplines together in a groundbreaking manner. Extensive close analysis of a single novel, Liviu Rebreanu’s Ion (1920), which was canonized as the “first modern Romanian novel,” forms the focal point for far-ranging historical investigations of Transylvania as a territory situated in inter-imperial geography, that is, at an intersection between multiple empires (Hapsburg, Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, and Russian).Parvulescu and Boatcǎ derive their conception of inter-imperiality from the works of Laura Doyle, who has focused scholarly attention on the relational and agonistic co-constitution of cultures, societies, and identifications in territories of imperial interpenetration. In Inter-imperiality: Vying Empires, Gendered Labor, and the Literary Arts of Alliance (Durham: Duke University Press, 2020), Doyle defines inter-imperiality as the “fraught condition” shaped by “multiply vectored relations among empires and among those who endure and maneuver among empires” (4). Drawing on Wallerstein’s world systems theory, the authors of Creolizing the Modern conceptualize Transylvania as a semi-periphery of Western European social and economic systems and brilliantly map the region’s inter-imperial condition in relation to global processes of domination, colonization, racialization, modernization, anti-imperial national mobilization, and more.Parvulescu and Boatcǎ toggle between the microscale of literary close reading and the macro-scale of sociologically informed transnational and global history. The result is a startling, exemplary combined method that recovers peripheral modernisms such as that of Rebreanu’s novel in relation to transnational circuits of literary production and that situates the study of Eastern European culture and society within global relational arcs, demonstrating both the commonality of the Transylvanian situation with multiple other sites of empire and imperial aftermath and its particularity in comparison to them.The introduction explains the monograph’s “conceit” of projecting global history out of a single novel set in modernizing and nationalizing rural Transylvania. This is an original means to access the historical complexity of inter-imperial Eastern Europe, destabilizing conceptions of a uniformly modern Europe made up of national territories, the homogeneous center of the world system, instead bringing to light Europe’s eastern semi-periphery—a creolized, multilingual, and multiconfessional scene of contestation among numerous imperial and subaltern communities and identifications. The introduction concludes with a sketch of the history of Transylvania since the Medieval era as a layered accumulation of diverse population segments (Romanian, Hungarian, Saxon, Jewish, Armenian, and Romani) out of multiple migrations and subjection to successive imperial powers.Seven chapters follow, each of which foregrounds particular aspects of Rebreanu’s novel, using them to motivate explorations of corresponding features of Transylvanian social history, considered in global theoretical and historical perspective. The first chapter focuses on the central engine of the novel’s plot, the initially impoverished Romanian peasant protagonist’s desire to acquire land. The chapter’s framing discussion situates this desire in relation to the nineteenth-century emancipation of serfs and their ensuing struggle to acquire property in order to secure both economic success and political rights tied to property ownership, as well as in reflection of the centrality of land in the nationalist imaginary. Already in this first chapter, the productivity of the authors’ inter-imperial approach is apparent in the account of the drama of land acquisition not only as the story of subaltern Romanian mobilization against imperial legacies and metropolitan power structures but also as a contest between Saxon and Romanian peasants arising out of conflicting claims to historical precedence and legitimacy within imperial systems of administration and justice. Whereas Rebreanu’s Ion has historically been read as a parable of national awakening, Parvulescu and Boatcǎ offer an account of competing national projects that foreclose class or other solidarities among subaltern populations.Chapters 2 and 3 give this intersectional analysis a further turn of the screw, offering accounts of Transylvanian communities that were largely excluded from participation in the region’s struggle between competing national and imperial claims: these were the communities of Jews and Roma. Both appear in the form of minor and secondary characters in Rebreanu’s novel, marked as alien to the social body in multiple ways. Chapter 2 discusses the expansion of banking, railways, bureaucratic regimes, and markets in labor and goods that integrated Transylvania into the capitalist world system as Austro-Hungary’s internal colony—a semi-periphery providing agricultural products as commodities to industrializing centers in Western Europe. The chapter ends with consideration of modern anti-Semitism as taken up and inflected by resistance to capitalist integration, as it is visible in the caricatured figure of the Jewish pub owner in Rebreanu’s novel. Chapter 3 turns to the history and legacies of the enslavement of the Roma in Wallachia and Moldavia as underpinning their extreme subaltern position, evident in Rebreanu’s novel in the representation of the Roma as figures beyond and therefore defining the limits of Romanian identity, rights, economic life, and propriety.Chapter 4, the most strikingly innovative of the book, develops the concept of “interglottism” to describe the social condition and biographical trajectories of people suspended among multiple languages interrelated via imperial, national, and ethnic rivalries and hierarchies. Interglottism is an inter-imperial correlate of linguistic creolization, yet its specificity lies in the persistence, despite histories of linguistic borrowing and mixing, of particularizing language ideologies founded on the imperial status of German or Hungarian, on the ostensible national linguistic authenticity of Romanian, or on the rejection of subaltern languages such as Yiddish and Romani. The center of the chapter brings Rebreanu’s novel into dialogue with the fascinating institutional and intellectual history of the first academic journal of Comparative Literature, Acta Comparationis Litterarum Universarum, founded by Hugó Meltzl in 1877 in Transylvania with an explicitly multilingual focus that, nevertheless, excluded Romanian as an insufficiently modern literary language, along with other subaltern regional languages. In this chapter, we encounter the historical entanglement of the methods of comparative inquiry with imperial hierarchy and national exclusions—the very entanglement that this book works to overcome.Chapters 5 and 6 turn to the linking and delinking of women and women’s rights with inter-imperial modernizing processes. Chapter 5 provides a close reading of the dowry plot in Rebreanu’s novel, which revolves around the peasant protagonist’s acquisition of land by raping, impregnating, and marrying a woman from a relatively propertied family. The abusive instrumentalization of the woman as a mechanism for exchange of wealth between men, the exploitation of her unrecognized labor, and the unremitting domestic abuse of her father and husband lead to her eventual suicide. Chapter 6 concerns a second woman character, the sister of an aspiring poet (a double of the novel’s author), a lower middle-class woman who appears briefly to resist subordination to patriarchal social institutions in the feminist key of a modern “New Woman,” yet who ultimately transforms into a model housewife and mother enlisted in Romanian nationalist cultural consolidation. In the cases of both peasant social advancement and bourgeois cultural life, the plot of Romanian anti-imperial resistance and modern nation building runs counter to women’s emancipation, as it was articulated in European metropolitan centers. The two chapters, which include framing accounts of feminist intellectual and social history in Hungary and Transylvania, render plain the intersectional dynamics that sacrificed feminist emancipation to national mobilization, rendering women as the bearers of an essentialized national being.Parvulescu’s and Boatcǎ’s seventh and final chapter turns to a consideration of religion, a no less rich site for inter-imperial inquiry. An account of regional religious history examines the confluence in Transylvania of Catholicism, Protestantism, Christian Orthodoxy, Uniate Christianity, and Judaism. As one more field of inter-imperial complexity and tension, and in contrast to the rise of ideologies of secularism in the western capitals, here religion becomes entangled with imperial power and patronage, with capitalist economic integration, in which church institutions were significant actors, and with nationalist mobilization, for which religion is taken up as a marker of authentic national identity.Creolizing the Modern is a groundbreaking work: it is a model of interdisciplinary collaboration and an elegant integration of analysis of local specificity with the broadest possible historical and theoretical framing. One of its greatest strengths is its transcendence of methodological nationalism, bringing to light histories in which resistance to imperial and other forms of domination often takes the form of negotiation with alternate hegemons or deflection of subalternity from one’s own group onto another, more marginal group or identity. Rather than solidarity in the face of imperial and economic oppressions, we find relational histories of contradiction and competition among competing modernization and emancipation projects.At times, the leap between analysis of Rebreanu’s novel and interrogation of global historical processes is overly rapid, leaving the impression that the analysis of Ion is merely a ploy, an excuse for an excursus in social history. Given that the authors’ creolizing reading of the novel is consistently staged as a polemic with canonical nationalist readings of the text, it would have been useful to include a coherent account of the place of Rebreanu and his work in the Romanian nationalist imaginary of the 1920s and afterwards. Strikingly, the one significant historical context of the novel that is not presented in a thick description is the immediate ideological context of its creation and subsequent interpretation.Yet these quibbles cannot detract from the accomplishments of Parvulescu’s and Boatcǎ’s book. Its development and application of the concept and methodology of Eastern European inter-imperiality, comparatively mapped against concrete examples and broad theorizations of the postcolonial and decolonial, compellingly and successfully brings these theory formations and geographies into fascinating and fruitful conversation, enriching all of them. Boundary-crossing in nature, this is a book that emphatically contributes to overcome area-studies silos of the past. It should be read and emulated far beyond the circles of specialists in Eastern Europe by all scholars of empire and its cultural and social legacies.

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